The Bill Nobody Reads
The Farm Bill is renewed approximately every five years. It is routinely the largest piece of legislation Congress passes. The 2026 version runs 1,847 pages, costs $1.5 trillion over ten years, and will affect the price of every item in your grocery cart.
Nobody reads it. That's the point.
Of the $1.5 trillion total, approximately $1.1 trillion — 73% — goes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and other food assistance. The remaining 27% is split between commodity subsidies, conservation programs, crop insurance, and a category the bill calls "rural development" that includes everything from broadband grants to ethanol mandates.
How It Raises Your Prices
The bill's impact on food prices operates through three mechanisms. First, the ethanol mandate — requiring that 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol be blended into the fuel supply — diverts approximately 40% of the U.S. corn crop away from food and feed. This artificial demand floor keeps corn prices elevated, which flows through to meat, dairy, and processed food costs.
Second, sugar import quotas — maintained in every Farm Bill since 1981 — keep domestic sugar prices roughly double the world market price. American consumers pay an estimated $3.5 billion per year more for sugar-containing products than they would under free market conditions.
Third, the dairy price support program — a system of marketing orders and production limits — maintains retail dairy prices above what competitive markets would produce.
Who Benefits
Indeed, the beneficiaries are concentrated. The top 10% of farm operations receive approximately 60% of commodity subsidy payments. The largest recipients — operations with gross revenues exceeding $1 million annually — are farming businesses, not family farms. The family farm narrative is the marketing; the corporate farm is the customer.
The market has a way of correcting political fantasy. But in agriculture, the market hasn't been allowed to operate freely since the New Deal. Eighty years of intervention have created a system that benefits large producers and penalizes consumers — and the Farm Bill ensures it continues.
The Alternative
Market-based agriculture would reduce consumer prices, eliminate the regressive transfer from urban consumers to rural corporations, and allow American farmers to compete globally without artificial constraints. New Zealand eliminated agricultural subsidies in 1984; its farming sector is now more productive and more diverse than it was under the subsidy regime.
But the Farm Bill isn't about agriculture. It's about a coalition — farm-state Republicans who want subsidies and urban Democrats who want SNAP — that makes the bill politically indestructible regardless of its economic merits.
One cannot spend what one does not have. But one can certainly force consumers to overpay for food and call it policy.
